On Tue, 10 Feb 2004 12:36:54 -0800, Raquel Rice wrote:

>��If changing the header size limit for Exim is a workaround, isn't
>��it also a workaround to want the same ability in SpamAssassin?

One possible reason:

Because changing Exim only changes Exim while giving the possibility (note: 
giving, not enforcing) to limit the size of reports in SA can fix this problem 
for other configurations as well.

Truncating the report in SA would be a workaround, but the possibility to 
combine multiple actual scores into one reported score would be feature that 
actually fixes the problem.

Example of a non Exim-related issue:

MIMEDefang (a sendmail milter that can call SA) currently uses a 8192 bytes 
buffer for the SA scores. If enough scores are hit, problems may occur.

David (author of MIMEDefang) tried upping the limit to 16384 bytes (in order to 
delay the problems), but this made MIMEDefang crash on Freebsd 4.7 (he thinks 
that *may* be because of stack limitations on that platform).

On Tue, 10 Feb 2004, Matthew Trent wrote:

>�OK, and what happens when some spammer/hacker decides to DoS you with
>�messages with horribly long headers? Or Mr. Executive/Boss/... creates
>�a maillist or alias that expands to 1000 recipients, etc...

The limit on what size of headers/report/whatever SA can insert does not 
necessarily correlate with the SMTP servers handling of headers for incoming 
mail.

In my example above, this has nothing to do with the maximum size of headers in 
sendmail or milters (SA doesn't insert the headers itself when called from MD), 
it is only about the communication between MD and SA.

I also wouldn't be suprised if sendmail and other smtp server capable of 
calling filters has completely different limitations in their filter API than 
they have for incoming mail. Does anyone know what (if any) limits sendmails 
milter API puts on headers inserted by milters?

Regards
/Jonas

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